Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …

Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819 and lived there, under a strict and closely watched upbringing, until the June morning in 1837 when she was woken to …

What I have always respected about Rembrandt is that he told the truth. Where so many painters flattered, smoothed and arranged, he set down what was in front of him, including his …

I was walking back from Covent Garden on a wet December evening, the kind where the Strand’s Christmas lights smear across the pavement and every black cab throws up a little wake …

The first royal I was ever drawn to was not British at all. She was Austrian. On my early trips to Vienna I kept circling back to Empress Elisabeth, the one everyone …

For a long time I thought the Renaissance was an Italian story, and mostly a Florentine one. Botticelli, Michelangelo, the great dome over Florence Cathedral. It was only once I began visiting …